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Sunday, February 20, 2011

Generation One Pretender Monsters

For some reason, I've been wanting to get these guys back out so I figured they would be good for a blog entry. There is also a good story to go with them, but first a little history. The G1 Pretender Monsters were released in 1989 near the end of the US run of Transformers. They also happened to be the last combiner group in Generation One. Each monster shell held a small almost micromaster sized robot that had two modes of its own, as was the gimmick for all pretenders. As an added bonus, all the figures combined into one larger robot, Monstructor. Unfortunately due to scale issues, the actual Monstructor toy was not much larger than the average sized transformer at the time despite being portrayed as a huge robot.

Here is where my story comes in. I never knew about these figures when they were first released. I was around eight years old at the time. Micromasters were beginning to dominate the Transformers franchise and I was loosing interest. Somewhere around 1997 after my interest had been rekindled once by G2 and once again by Beast Wars, I found these guys at a flea market in my hometown. Back then this stuff was going cheap. I was able to walk away with all of these guys 100% complete (tech specs, instructions and all) for $30 total. Today they routinely sell for over $300. The kicker is I almost didn't pick them up. Back then I didn't know a whole lot about the tail end of G1 (I was thrilled to find out about Piranacon although that is another story) but I had remembered seeing them in issue #67 of the Marvel comic run. It was this tiny reference that pushed me to buy them. Oddly enough issue #67 is the only issue in which they appear in the entire US comic and I only owned three issues at the time: #67, #76 & #78. When I got them home and discovered they combined as well, I was just floored. Talk about a good investment.

Unfortunately I am too afraid to transform them anymore due to Gold Plastic Syndrome, so I leave them in combined form on my shelf. But they were fun toys while they lasted.